'Well, cheers again,' Patrick said when he sat down. They all chinked their glasses and the crystal rang out like a bell. Calling her home. Not this home, some other home she hadn't discovered yet.

'Cheers,' Tim said and Louise said, 'Slainte,' just to remind them that they were in her country now.

She ran her finger round the rim of the crystal. Samantha's crystal.

'Louise?'

'Mm?'

'I was just saying to Patrick,' Bridget said, 'that you must come and visit us in the summer.'

'That would be great, I've never been to Eastbourne. Are you near the beach?'

'Wimborne actually. It's not on the coast,' Bridget said. Inside Bridget's smug and well-upholstered middle-class body there might be a perfectly decent human being. Or not.

Louise knocked back the rest of the wine in her glass and searched for her own inner adult. Found her. Lost her again.

*

'There's ice-cream in the freezer,' Patrick said. 'Cherry Garcia,' he said to Bridget. 'Is that OK with you?' 'What does that mean?' she said querulously. 'I've never understood.'

'The Grateful Dead,' Patrick said. 'Never your kind of music, Bridie. As I seem to remember, you were more ofa Partridge Family fan.'

'And you weren't?' Louise said to him. 'You don't seem like you were ever a Deadhead to me.'

'Sometimes I wonder who you think you married,' he said. What did that mean? He stood up and began to clear the plates. The food, cold and congealed, looked disgusting now.

'I'll get the ice-cream,' Louise said,jumping up so quickly that she nearly knocked Tim's glass over. She managed to catch it just in time.

'Good save,' he murmured. He was so English. A different class of person from Louise. Louise had a knee-jerk reaction to the accent ofa dominant culture. It was funny how sometimes you could realize you were all alone in a roomful of people. Well, four people, one of whom was you. Stranger in a strange land, a Ruth amongst an alien middle-class corn.

Instead ofgoing straight to the kitchen, she ran up the stairs to her bedroom (their bedroom) and took her rings out of the safe. The safe had been a proviso of the insurance company because of the value of the diamond. When she changed her insurance, the new insurance company insisted that Louise install a monitored security system and a safe, 'For the ring, Mrs Brennan,' the girl on the other end of the phone said. Louise had never been called 'Mrs' in her life and couldn't believe the amount of bile that shot into her system at the word, and not just at that word, but to add insult to injury the girl had called her by Patrick's surname as if she was a chattel. She was baffied by women who changed their names when they got married, your name was the closest thing to your self. Sometimes your name was all you had. Joanna Hunter changed her name when she married, but then you would, wouldn't you? But at least she could cling to the epithet of'Doctor' to give her an identity. If Louise was in Joanna Hunter's shoes she would have changed her name long before marriage. She wouldn't have wanted to be known for ever as that little girl lost in the bloody field ofwheat. Louise might not have had an idyllic childhood but it had been a whole lot better than Joanna Hunter's.

'That would be Detective ChiefInspector Monroe,' she said coldly to the girl from the insurance company. 'Not Mrs Brennan.'

Louise only found out afterwards that Patrick had bought the diamond ring with some of the money invested from Samantha's life insurance. Truly a blood diamond, after all.

She didn't often wear the big diamond, just occasionally if they were going out somewhere. He made her go out places, theatre, restaurants, opera, concerts, dinner parties -even, God help her, to charity fund-raisers where the rich and richer hobnobbed at two thousand a table. Kilts and ceilidhs, Louise's idea ofhell. Still, it made her realize how narrow she had let her life become, it had just been Archie, work, her cat, although not necessarily in that order. And now her cat was dead and Archie had spread his wings. 'Live your life, Louise,' Patrick said, 'don't endure it.'

She didn't wear her wedding ring either. Patrick wore his. He never mentioned her unworn wedding ring or the diamond in the safe. Lying in bed at night Louise could see the rings glinting in the dark, even when the safe was shut. Band of gold. Band around the heart. Heart of darkness. Darkness evermore.

There had been another man once. The kind of man she could have imagined standing shoulder to shoulder with, a comrade-inarms, but they had been as chaste as protagonists in an Austen novel. All sense and no sensibility, no persuasion at all. She had kept vaguely in touch with Jackson but it had been going nowhere because it had nowhere to go. He'd had a pregnant girlfriend and neither of them had talked about the consequences of that in their occasional drunken, late-night texts. Then the pregnant girlfriend dumped him and told him it wasn't his baby and they hadn't talked about the consequences of that either. Perhaps it had only been Louise who had been drunk. She wasn't a drinker, not really (,Only days with a "y" in them'), she would never go down the same path as her mother, but sometimes, before she met Patrick, she had found herself looking forward to pouring the first drink of the evening in a way that went beyond pleasant anticipation. Now her drinking followed Patrick's civilized regime, a glass or two of a good red with a meal. Just as well, she made a maudlin drunk.

Patrick believed in the health-giving properties of red wine. He had embraced the Red Wine Diet, buying cases of some French wine that was going to make him live for ever. He went for a swim five mornings a week, played golf twice a week, had a positive attitude every day of the week. It was like living with an alien pretending to be human.

He was solicitous about her health too (,Ever thought of doing yoga? Tai-chi? Something meditative?'). He didn't want to be widowed a second time. A surgeon seeing off two wives in a row, it wouldn't look good.

She slipped the ring on her finger. Let Bridget see that her price nlight not be above rubies but she was worth a three-and-a-halfcarat piece of ice. She added her wedding ring and her finger felt suddenly weighed down. The rings were tight. For a second she thought they had shrunk, until she realized that it was more likely that her finger had grown bigger.

Catching sight of herself in the nlirror she felt shocked -her skin was alabaster and her eyes were huge and black, as if she'd been taking belladonna. At her temple a large vein throbbed like a worm buried beneath her skin. She looked like someone who had been in a terrible accident.

She had heard the phone ringing insistently downstairs and by the time she came reluctantly down Patrick was in the hallway, pulling on his Berghaus and making eagerly for the door. 'There's been a train crash,' he said to her. 'A bad one. All hands on deck tonight,' he added cheerfully. 'Conung?'

Funny Old World REGGIE CHASE, AS SMALL AS A MOUSE, AS QUIET AS A HOUSE WITH NO one home. She was absent-mindedly scratching the top of Banjo's head. Homer was open on her lap but she was watching Coronation Street. She had almost finished an old box of violet creams that she'd rummaged out of the back of one of Ms MacDonald's kitchen cupboards (any port in a storm). She checked the clock, Ms MacDonald would be home soon.

She could hear a train approaching, the noise muted at first by the wind and then growing louder and louder. Not the usual train noise, but a great rumbling wave ofsound that seemed to be rolling towards the house. Reggie leaped instinctively to her feet, she had the feeling that the train was actually going to come through the house. Then another higher-pitched sound as if a giant hand was clawing a giant blackboard with giant fingernails and finally a tremendous bang like an explosive clap of thunder. The apocalypse had come to town.